The Patrick Melrose Novels Read online

  It was only when he considered to whom these golden legs belonged that his fleeting erection seemed a small and inconvenient reward for a state of almost permanent irritation. In fact, scanning the figure above the waist, along the fringed sleeve of her black suede jacket, and up towards the bored and stubborn expression on her face, he felt a spasm of revulsion and estrangement. Why was he taking this ludicrous creature to stay with David Melrose who was, after all, a man of some discernment, not to say a merciless snob?

  The terminal building smelled of disinfectant. A woman in blue overalls drifted across the glaring floor, the circular pads of her polishing machine humming as she swung it gently back and forth across the black and brown translucent pebbles trapped in cheap white marble. Still stoned, Bridget lost herself in the flakes of colour as if they were the flint and quartz stars of a white sky.

  ‘What are you staring at?’ snapped Nicholas.

  ‘This floor is something else,’ said Bridget.

  At passport control she could not find her passport but Nicholas refused to start a scene just when they were about to meet Eleanor.

  ‘Rather eccentrically, in this airport one crosses the main lobby before collecting one’s luggage,’ said Nicholas. ‘That’s probably where Eleanor will be waiting for us.’

  ‘Wow!’ said Bridget. ‘If I was a smuggler,’ she paused, hoping Nicholas might challenge her, ‘this would be my dream airport. I mean, there’s this whole lobby where you could slip someone your hand luggage, full of goodies, and then go and fetch your legal luggage for Customs.’

  ‘That’s what I admire about you,’ said Nicholas, ‘your creative thinking. You might have had a brilliant career in advertising; although I think as far as smuggling goes the Marseilles authorities have more pressing problems to wrestle with than any “goodies” you might import in your handbag. I don’t know if you’re aware of it but…’

  Bridget had stopped listening. Nicholas was being a wanker again. He always got like this when he was uptight; in fact he was like this all the time except when he was in bed, or with people he wanted to charm. Lagging behind, she stuck her tongue out at him. Nyah, nyah, nyah … boring, boring, boring.

  Bridget covered her ears and looked down at her dragging feet, while Nicholas strode on alone, pouring sarcasm on ideas increasingly remote from Bridget’s tame remarks about smuggling.

  Looking up again, Bridget saw a familiar figure. It was Barry leaning against the pillar next to the news-stand. Barry could always sense when he was being looked at and, depending on his mood, attributed this to ‘paranoia’ or ‘ESP’.

  ‘Bridge! Incredible!’

  ‘Barry! All you need is love,’ said Bridget, reading out loud the words on Barry’s T-shirt and laughing.

  ‘This really is incredible,’ said Barry, running his fingers through his long black hair. ‘You know I was thinking about you this morning.’

  Barry thought about Bridget every morning, but it still struck him as further evidence of mind control that he had not only thought about her today but run into her at the airport as well.

  ‘We’re going to Arles for the Progressive Jazz Festival,’ said Barry. ‘Hey, why don’t you come along? It’s going to be really fantastic. Bux Millerman is playing.’

  ‘Wow,’ breathed Bridget.

  ‘Hey, listen,’ said Barry, ‘take Etienne’s number anyway. That’s where I’ll be staying and maybe we can like meet up.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Bridget, ‘great.’

  Barry pulled out a giant Rizla rolling paper and scribbled a number on it. ‘Don’t smoke it,’ he said humorously, ‘or we’ll never get in touch.’

  Bridget gave him the Melrose number because she knew he would not use it, and that this whole meeting-up thing was not going to happen. ‘How long have you been here?’ she asked.

  ‘Ten days roughly and the only piece of advice I can give you is don’t drink the pink. That wine is full of chemical shit and the hangover is worse than the comedown off a sulphate binge.’

  Nicholas’s voice burst in on them. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ He glared at her. ‘You’re really pushing your luck, swanning off in the middle of an airport without any warning. I’ve been dragging round these fucking cases looking for you for the last quarter of an hour.’

  ‘You should get a trolley,’ said Barry.

  Nicholas stared straight ahead of him as if nobody had spoken. ‘Don’t ever do this again or I’ll snap you like … Ah, there’s Eleanor!’

  ‘Nicholas, I’m so sorry. We got caught on the Ferris wheel at a funfair and instead of letting us off they sent it round a second time. Can you imagine?’

  ‘So like you, Eleanor, always getting more fun than you bargained for.’

  ‘Well, I’m here now.’ Eleanor greeted Nicholas and Bridget with a flat circular wave, like someone polishing a windowpane. ‘And this is Anne Moore.’

  ‘Hi,’ said Anne.

  ‘How do you do?’ said Nicholas, and introduced Bridget.

  Eleanor led them towards the car park and Bridget blew a kiss over her shoulder in Barry’s direction.

  ‘Ciao,’ said Barry, jabbing his finger at the confident words on his T-shirt. ‘Don’t forget.’

  ‘Who was that fascinating-looking man your girlfriend was talking to?’ asked Eleanor.

  ‘Oh, just somebody on the plane,’ said Nicholas. He was annoyed to find Barry at the airport and for a moment he thought that Bridget might have arranged the meeting. The idea was absurd, but he could not shake it off, and as soon as they were all settled in the car, he hissed at her, ‘What were you talking to that chap about?’

  ‘Barry isn’t a chap,’ said Bridget, ‘that’s what I like about him, but if you really want to know, he said, “Don’t drink the pink, it’s full of chemical shit and the hangover is worse than a comedown off a speed binge.”’

  Nicholas swivelled round and gave her a deadly look.

  ‘He’s absolutely right, of course,’ said Eleanor. ‘Perhaps we should have asked him to dinner.’

  7

  AFTER HANGING PATRICK FROM his ears and watching him escape from the library, David shrugged, sat down at the piano, and started to improvise a fugue. His rheumatic hands protested at every key he touched. A glass of pastis, like a trapped cloud, stood on top of the piano. His body ached all day long and the pain woke him at night every time he shifted position. Nightmares often woke him as well and made him whimper and scream so loudly that his insomnia overflowed into neighbouring bedrooms. His lungs, also, were shot away and when his asthma flared up he wheezed and rattled, his face swollen by the cortisone he used to appease his constricted chest. Gasping, he would pause at the top of the stairs, unable to speak, his eyes roaming over the ground as if he were searching for the air he desperately needed.

  At the age of fifteen his musical talent had attracted the interest of the great piano teacher Shapiro, who took on only one pupil at a time. Unfortunately, within a week, David had contracted rheumatic fever and spent the next six months in bed with hands too stiff and clumsy to practise on the piano. The illness wiped out his chances of becoming a serious pianist and, although pregnant with musical ideas, from then on he claimed to be bored by composition and those ‘hordes of little tadpoles’ one had to use to record music on paper. Instead, he had hordes of admirers who pleaded with him to play after dinner. They always clamoured for the tune they had heard last time, which he could not remember, until they heard the one he played now, which he soon forgot. His compulsion to amuse others and the arrogance with which he displayed his talent combined to disperse the musical ideas he had once guarded so closely and secretly.

  Even while he drank in the flattery he knew that underneath this flamboyant frittering away of his talent he had never overcome his reliance on pastiche, his fear of mediocrity, and the rankling suspicion that the first attack of fever was somehow self-induced. This insight was useless to him; to know the causes of his failure did not diminish th
e failure, but it did make his self-hatred a little more convoluted and a little more lucid than it would have been in a state of plain ignorance.

  As the fugue developed, David attacked its main theme with frustrated repetitions, burying the initial melody under a mudslide of rumbling bass notes, and spoiling its progress with violent bursts of dissonance. At the piano he could sometimes abandon the ironic tactics which saturated his speech, and visitors whom he had bullied and teased to the point of exasperation found themselves moved by the piercing sadness of the music in the library. On the other hand, he could turn the piano on them like a machine gun and concentrate a hostility into his music that made them long for the more conventional unkindness of his conversation. Even then, his playing would haunt the people who most wanted to resist his influence.

  David stopped playing abruptly and closed the lid over the keyboard. He took a gulp of pastis and started to massage his left palm with his right thumb. This massage made the pain a little worse, but gave him the same psychological pleasure as tearing at scabs, probing abscesses and mouth ulcers with his tongue, and fingering bruises.

  When a couple of stabs from his thumb had converted the dull ache in his palm into a sharper sensation, he leaned over and picked up a half-smoked Montecristo cigar. One was ‘supposed’ to remove the paper band from the cigar, and so David left it on. To break even the smallest rules by which others convinced themselves that they were behaving correctly gave him great pleasure. His disdain for vulgarity included the vulgarity of wanting to avoid the appearance of being vulgar. In this more esoteric game, he recognized only a handful of players, Nicholas Pratt and George Watford among them, and he could just as easily despise a man for leaving the band on his cigar. He enjoyed watching Victor Eisen, the great thinker, thrashing about in these shallow waters, more firmly hooked each time he tried to cross the line that separated him from the class he yearned to belong to.

  David brushed the soft flakes of cigar ash from his blue woollen dressing gown. Every time he smoked he thought of the emphysema that had killed his father, and felt annoyed by the prospect of dying in the same manner.

  Under the dressing gown he wore a pair of very faded and much darned pyjamas that had become his on the day his father was buried. The burial had taken place conveniently close to his father’s house, in the little churchyard he had spent the last few months of his life staring at through the window of his study. Wearing the oxygen mask which he humorously called his ‘gas mask’, and unable to negotiate the ‘stair drill’, he slept in his study, which he renamed the ‘departure lounge’, on an old Crimean campaign bed left to him by his uncle.

  David attended the damp and conventional funeral without enthusiasm; he already knew he had been disinherited. As the coffin was lowered into the ground, he reflected how much of his father’s life had been spent in a trench of one sort or another, shooting at birds or men, and how it was really the best place for him.

  After the funeral, when the guests had left, David’s mother came up to his old bedroom for a moment of private mourning with her son. She said, in her sublime voice, ‘I know he would have wanted you to have these,’ and placed a pair of carefully folded pyjamas on the bed. When David did not reply, she pressed his hand and closed her faintly blue eyelids for a moment, to show that such things lay too deep for words, but that she knew how much he would prize the little pile of white and yellow flannel from a shop in Bond Street which had gone out of business before the First World War.

  It was the same yellow and white flannel that had now grown too hot. David got up from the piano stool and paced about with his dressing gown open, puffing on his cigar. There was no doubt that he was angry with Patrick for running away. It had spoiled his fun. He granted that he had perhaps miscalculated the amount of discomfort he could safely inflict on Patrick.

  David’s methods of education rested on the claim that childhood was a romantic myth which he was too clear-sighted to encourage. Children were weak and ignorant miniature adults who should be given every incentive to correct their weakness and their ignorance. Like King Chaka, the great Zulu warrior, who made his troops stamp thorn bushes into the ground in order to harden their feet, a training some of them may well have resented at the time, he was determined to harden the calluses of disappointment and develop the skill of detachment in his son. After all, what else did he have to offer him?

  For a moment he was winded by a sense of absurdity and impotence; he felt like a farmer watching a flock of crows settle complacently on his favourite scarecrow.

  But he pushed on bravely with his original line of thought. No, it was no use expecting gratitude from Patrick, although one day he might realize, like one of Chaka’s men running over flinty ground on indifferent feet, how much he owed to his father’s uncompromising principles.

  When Patrick was born David had been worried that he might become a refuge or an inspiration to Eleanor, and he had jealously set about ensuring that this did not happen. Eleanor eventually resigned herself to a vague and luminous faith in Patrick’s ‘wisdom’, a quality she attributed to him some time before he had learned to control his bowels. She thrust him downstream in this paper boat and collapsed back, exhausted by terror and guilt. Even more important to David than the very natural worry that his wife and his son might grow fond of one another was the intoxicating feeling that he had a blank consciousness to work with, and it gave him great pleasure to knead this yielding clay with his artistic thumbs.

  As he walked upstairs to get dressed, even David, who spent most of his day angry or at least irritated, and who made a point of not letting things surprise him, was surprised by the burst of rage that swept over him. What had started as indignation at Patrick’s escape turned now into a fury he could no longer control. He strode into his bedroom with his underlip pushed out petulantly and his fists clenched, but he felt at the same time a strong desire to escape his own atmosphere, like a crouching man hurrying to get away from the whirling blades of the helicopter in which he has just landed.

  The bedroom he entered had a mock-monastic look, large and white, with bare dark-brown tiles miraculously warm in winter when the underfloor heating was turned on. The only painting on the wall was a picture of Christ wearing the crown of thorns, one of which pierced his pale brow. A trickle of still fresh blood ran down his smooth forehead towards his swimming eyes, which looked up diffidently at this extraordinary headgear as if to ask, ‘But is it really me?’ The painting was a Correggio and easily the most valuable object in the house, but David had insisted on hanging it in his bedroom, saying sweetly that he would ask for nothing else.

  The brown and gold bedhead, bought by Eleanor’s mother, who was by then the Duchesse de Valençay, from a dealer who assured her that Napoleon’s head had rested against it on at least one occasion, further compromised the austerity of the room, as did the dark-green silk Fortuny bedspread, covered in phoenixes floating up from the fires beneath them. Curtains of the same fabric hung from a simple wooden pole, at windows which opened onto a balcony with a wrought-iron balustrade.

  David opened these windows impatiently and stepped onto the balcony. He looked at the tidy rows of vines, the rectangular fields of lavender, the patches of pinewood, and beyond to the villages of Bécasse and St-Crau draped over the lower hills. ‘Like a couple of ill-fitting skull-caps,’ as he liked to say to Jewish friends.

  He shifted his gaze upward and scanned the long curved ridge of the mountain which, on a clear day like this, seemed so close and so wild. Searching for something in the landscape that would receive his mood and answer it, he could only think again, as he had so often before, how easy it would be to dominate the whole valley with a single machine gun riveted to the rail which he now gripped with both hands.

  He was turning back restlessly towards the bedroom when a movement below the balcony caught the corner of his eye.

  * * *

  Patrick had stayed in his hiding place for as long as he could, but it was co
ld in there out of the sun and so he scrambled from under the bush and, with theatrical reluctance, started to walk back home through the tall dry grass. To sulk alone was difficult. He felt the need for a wider audience but he wished he didn’t. He dared not punish anyone with his absence, because he was not sure that his absence would be noticed.

  He walked along slowly, then curved back to the edge of the wall and stopped to stare at the big mountain on the other side of the valley. The massive formations up on the crest and the smaller ones dotted over its sides yielded shapes and faces as he willed them to appear. An eagle’s head. A grotesque nose. A party of dwarfs. A bearded old man. A rocket ship, and countless leprous and obese profiles with cavernous eye sockets formed out of the smoky fluidity his concentration gave to the stone. After a while, he no longer recognized what he was thinking and, just as a shop window sometimes prevents the onlooker from seeing the objects behind the glass and folds him instead in a narcissistic embrace, his mind ignored the flow of impressions from the outside world and locked him into a daydream he could not have subsequently described.

  The thought of lunch dragged him back into the present with a strong sense of anxiety. What was the time? Was he too late? Would Yvette still be there to talk to him? Would he have to eat alone with his father? He always recovered from his mental truancy with disappointment. He enjoyed the feeling of blankness, but it frightened him afterwards when he came out of it and could not remember what he had been thinking.

  Patrick broke into a run. He was convinced that he had missed lunch. It was always at a quarter to two and normally Yvette would come out and call him, but hiding in the bushes he might not have heard.

  When he arrived outside the kitchen, Patrick could see Yvette through the open door, washing lettuce in the sink. He had a stitch in his side from running, and now that he could tell that lunch was some way off he felt embarrassed by his desperate haste. Yvette waved to him from the sink, but he did not want to look hurried, so he just waved back and strolled past the door, as if he had business of his own to attend to. He decided to check once more whether he could find the lucky tree frog before doubling back to the kitchen to sit with Yvette.